THE WAR AND AMERICAN 
DEMOCRACY 



WILBUR C. ABBOTT 



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Reprinted from The Yale Review, April, 1916 
[Copyright by the Yale Publishing Association, New Haven, Conn.] 



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THE WAR AND AMERICAN 
DEMOCRACY 



BY 

WILBUR C. ABBOTT 



Reprinted from The Yale Review, April, 1916 
[Copyright by the Yale Publishing Association, New Haven, Conn.] 



. As 



THE WAR AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 
By Wilbur C. Abbott 

THE great adventure is nearly over. Whatever the 
"will to conquer," whatever the invincible determina- 
tion, the heroic courage, the stubborn resistance, the mag- 
nificent self-sacrifice of either side in this terrific European 
conflict, a decision cannot be much longer delayed. The 
deadlock will be broken, and one side or the other will slowly 
and sullenly give way. For, whether there be a limit to men 
and war materials, food and credit, there is a limit to human 
endurance; and that limit will presently be reached. The 
central powers are in the position of the garrison of a 
beleaguered and blockaded fortress. To win they must raise 
the siege. No amount of sallies and sorties like drives on 
their eastern and western fronts, and cheap victories over 
Serbians and Montenegrins, will avail, if their enemies hold 
on. And to win the Allies must hold on. 

That is the military situation, briefly put ; yet the military 
situation alone is not what now interests the world the most. 
In a little more than eighteen months, millions of the first 
line of men in Europe have given their lives in whole or in 
part to the tremendous sacrifice; and many times that num- 
ber of human beings have suffered losses which can never be 
repaired. More than a hundred thousand square miles of 
territory has been laid waste ; the labors of past generations 
have been swept away, and the earnings of the future have 
been mortgaged almost beyond computation; the whole 
economic situation of the world has been disarranged. And, 
far beyond all reckoning of material destruction, the suffer- 
ing inflicted on humanity has grown beyond our capacity to 
conceive. 

Such are the fruits of eighteen months of war. And to 



WAR AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 485 

what end? That is the question which confronts us all. 
What have we learned from this great tragedy; and what 
shall we do now? What, in effect, has been the reaction 
upon self-governing communities, and, in particular, upon 
America? Not many months since, debate hinged on the 
question of who was responsible for the outbreak of hostili- 
ties. Now no one talks of how the war began, save in rela- 
tion to how it must end, and the steps to be taken to prevent 
the recurrence of such a calamity. Upon whatever guilty 
consciences the horror of its beginning rests, time will deter- 
mine. Now another issue dominates our minds, that such 
a visitation must not happen again; and, in particular, that 
it must not happen to us. 

That is unquestionably the first result of the war on the 
thought of mankind in general to-day. In every part of 
the world, the sentiments expressed in the large, vague 
phrases of the Declaration of Independence — "life, liberty, 
and the pursuit of happiness" — have come suddenly to have 
a personal and specific meaning to millions of men, which 
they have long lacked. And the second thought is not unlike 
the first. It is a hope that from this great conflict may come 
some good, that, through an infinity of suffering, humanity 
may somehow win to a higher and nobler existence than the 
material prosperity which recent generations have so plenti- 
fully enjoyed, and which we have come to reckon as the chief 
if not the sole end of man. There is a growing determina- 
tion to see that these men shall not have died in vain. What- 
ever vast mirage of world dominion and places in the sun 
may fill the minds of the lords of war, there is preeminent 
in the minds of those beyond that narrow circle of great ones 
a vision of a higher and a greater peace. 

But when we come to the tremendous problem of how to 
secure it, men instinctively divide. Those "happy souls 
to whom God reveals himself in the form of platitudes" find 
here a golden opportunity to discourse at large upon their 
startling discovery of the obvious and their laborious demon- 



486 THE YALE REVIEW 

stration of what everybody knows. Ignorant and ineffective 
enthusiasts endeavor to still the tempest with kind words. 
Politicians seek a remedy in the framing of an "issue" — a 
form of words for which the majority of their constituents 
will vote; while a not inconsiderable number of individuals 
who find in this world-wide calamity a heaven-sent oppor- 
tunity to exploit themselves, fill the press, the pulpit, and 
the air with clamorous advice and prophecy. Yet amid the 
incessant din, the statesmen of the warring powers have thus 
far met all advances looking towards the cessation of hostili- 
ties with one brief but comprehensive phrase, "We must 
fight it out." 

In those five words the answer lies. Whatever the original 
causes and circumstances of the war, it seems apparent that 
the situation has now come to this — we are in one of 
those periods of human development when two great ideas 
have reached an issue which admits of the continuance of but 
one. Behind all questions of economic progress and neces- 
sity, world dominion or balance of power, the rights of small 
states, freedom of the seas, stands the stark antagonism of 
militarism and the security of non-military states. Between 
them no compromise is possible; one must fail. Either the 
Germanic powers will be overthrown or the world must enter 
upon that competition in armaments whose neglect cost the 
Allies the first year of the war, and was like to cost them, if 
not their existence, at least the terms on which that existence 
might be maintained. 

Such is the second of the conclusions at which men in gen- 
eral have arrived as the result of their experience of the past 
eighteen months. And the third is not unlike the other two ; 
it is, in fact, compounded of them both. It is the necessity of 
determining, once for all, the standards of civilization which 
we are to endeavor to maintain for the future. This is no 
so-called academic question. It is the greatest practical issue 
which has forced itself into the world of politics since the 
abolition of slavery, far surpassing in importance all prob- 



WAR AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 487 

lems of international supremacy and forms of government; 
and, in particular, it is the one fundamental question of the 
conflict in whose solution the United States has a deciding 
voice. 

The reasons for the necessity of such a decision are evident 
enough. They lie in the introduction not so much of new 
mechanisms into the business of war, though that has been 
the most spectacular feature of the contest, but in the pro- 
mulgation of a code of morals, based largely on those 
mechanisms, by one of the parties to the conflict. It is this 
which differentiates the present struggle from its more 
immediate predecessors, rather even than those doctrines of 
world power or downfall which have found their chief expo- 
nents in the same quarter. And, as these are the peculiar 
product of the Prussian mind, which has thus challenged the 
accepted beliefs and conventions upon which our society is 
based, it is upon the central powers that there must rest 
the burden of justifying their course. It is, in large meas- 
ure, their practices which have relegated to the background 
the question of who began the war, and made civilization 
rather than political power the issue which confronts the 
world. 

If credit is to be taken for such principles and practices, 
it is but fair to examine, in the light of their results in the 
last year and a half, what effect they have produced in bring- 
ing victory to those who hold to them. The conclusion can 
hardly be reassuring to their exponents. For if, at the end 
of eighteen months of fighting, one phenomenon is of more 
striking quality than another in the situation of affairs, it 
is what may be called the hardening of the conflict. It has 
not infrequently been the case in previous wars that, after a 
certain period of combat, there has come a relaxation in the 
efforts of the antagonists, a weakening of fibre, a slackening 
of determination, a loss of nerve, tending to the conclusion 
of a peace favorable to the side which seems at that moment 
dominant. It was so in the Seven Years' War, which fol- 



488 THE YALE REVIEW 

lowed Prussia's attack on Austria a century and three- 
quarters ago; it was so in the Six Weeks' War, which 
followed Prussia's attack on Austria fifty years ago. And 
such a result, if we are to judge from the highest official 
German utterances of a twelvemonth since, was expected by 
the leaders of the central powers in the present conflict. 
When it became apparent that decision was not to be attained 
by surprise — as it was at the outset of the War of the Aus- 
trian Succession, when Frederic the Great overran Silesia 
in 1742, and again in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 — 
much talk ensued of the struggle being determined by the 
stronger German nerves, the greater capacity for endurance, 
the superior heroism under suffering of that great people, 
such as brought them victory after Frederic's aggression had 
arrayed Europe against them. With that there went, 
unquestionably, a hope that, as in the earlier desperate 
period, some division among their enemies might snatch 
them from the jaws of destruction. And this change in tone 
marked a great stage in the fortunes of the conflict. 

Such talk has all but ceased as the long, wearing process 
of blockade and attrition has gone on. Von Hindenburg and 
von Bethmann-Hollweg have long since declared that the 
Allies were now defeated and should make terms of peace in 
accordance with the military situation. But that declaration 
has fallen on deaf ears, and for very obvious reasons. It has 
been charged against the English that they regard war as 
sport; but these German utterances are the talk of minds 
steeped in the tradition of manoeuvres. "The Red army has 
tactically defeated the Blue. On the basis of the present dis- 
positions, the judges declare that the former are the victors." 
And so the struggle ends. But this is not the language of 
war and politics as we hear it from the lips of those opposed 
to the Germanic powers. Stein and Stadion were not more 
set upon the overthrow of the greatest of militarists a cen- 
tury ago than Asquith and Briand seem to be bent upon 
the destruction of the German menace to-day. The first 



WAR AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 489 

Alexander was not more determined to endure even the loss 
of Moscow for the sake of ultimate victory over Napoleon 
than the present Alexander has proved himself willing to 
suffer scarcely less humiliation to rid Europe of this new 
danger to her independence. For this is no mere quarrel of 
governments, such as filled the days of the old statecraft; 
this, like the war against Napoleon, is a primal conflict of 
principles and civilization. And, if recent private reports 
from the central powers may be believed, some conscious- 
ness of this seems to be forcing itself upon the German 
people, and undermining their faith in their leaders. They 
have begun to fear that, if the Allies persist, they may not 
lose but they cannot win the war. Reinforced by losses, by 
sacrifices, and by sheer destitution, this feeling has been 
reflected in the most recent statements regarding the inhu- 
manity of the blockade, and the self-sufficiency of the central 
powers to withstand indefinite siege. And this marks 
another stage of the conflict, not of arms, alone, but what is 
of far more consequence, of opinions. 

Meanwhile what of the Allies and the world at large? 
Few facts are more surprising to the political observers, 
mindful of the past, than the simple circumstance that the 
Germanic enemies have not as yet broken away from their 
agreement to stand or fall together. It is, no doubt, partly 
because their respective interests are for the time at one ; nor 
is that, perhaps, as culpable as it appears to eyes in whose 
sight an alliance with the Turk has seemed commendable, 
and Armenian massacres defensible. It is, in part, no doubt, 
through the financing of their allies by English and French 
gold, as Turkey and Bulgaria, with mischief-makers in 
America, have been financed from Berlin. It is, in part and 
in large part, due to the ineradicable passion of Europeans 
to resist the dominance of any single standard of civilization 
or culture or power over the rest of the Continent; nor 
should that sentiment be incomprehensible to the descendants 



490 THE YALE REVIEW 

of the men who fought the Wars of Liberation against 
Napoleon. 

But it is, undoubtedly, due in still larger measure to the 
methods of war which Germany has re-introduced into a 
civilization whence men had fondly hoped, before this war 
began, they had been forever driven out, that the conflict 
has deepened in intensity. Whatever parts the governments 
may have played, recent events and observers unite in forc- 
ing the conviction that this is now a peoples' war. That this 
is largely the effect of "fright fulness" no disinterested 
person can well deny; and Germany's best friends must 
deplore a policy which has lost her more than a great defeat, 
and recruited the ranks and determination of her opponents 
more than a victory of the Allies. If the latent barbarism 
beneath the veneer of civilization has proved greater than we 
thought, it is no less evident that men's nerves have not 
suffered as much deterioration from modern conditions as 
was believed by those who sought through such means to 
overpower these opponents. And the demonstrated futility 
of such operations, were there no other reason for their dis- 
continuance, portends their re-elimination from the military 
code. 

Yet it is not alone by their effect upon the enemies of 
Germany that we must judge the matter. It is idle to try 
to evade the fact that the great outstanding result of the 
eighteen months of conflict upon the world at large has been 
the alienation of sympathy from the German cause. Many 
to whom England was anathema, to whom France and Italy 
were no more than names, and Russia only the symbol of a 
cruel and unenlightened despotism, have come to the same 
position as the Allies in the face of the events of the war. 
Yet theirs has not been the great disillusionment. On those 
whose lives have been spent in contact with men of German 
blood, to whom German was another mother tongue, who 
have owed their education and their impulse to science and 
scholarship, to art and music, largely to that influence, to 



WAR AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 491 

those whose lifelong friends were of that race, the revelation 
of the military and diplomatic morality of the central powers 
has fallen heavily. And still more to those who have loyally 
accepted the faiths and practices of their adopted country 
which has given them the liberty and the opportunity denied 
them at home, with all their affection for the land from 
whence they came, the conduct of those now directing Ger- 
man destinies has been a crushing blow. Nor can we but 
believe that, once the hot blood of fight has had time to cool, 
and all the facts have been made manifest, the deeper mor- 
ality of that older Germany will re-assert itself against the 
false patriotism and the spurious philosophy which, in the 
hands of the facile servants of a dynastic interest, have so 
misled them into this long-abandoned road of human 
progress. 

The well-known facts of a year and a half of war have 
taught the world what are the peculiar products of the 
school which now rules Germany. And no attempt to cover 
them in the decent apparel of modern civilization and make 
them seem natural, inevitable, and in accord with the senti- 
ments of the world at large, has succeeded. No diplomatic 
device, no sophistry, has explained or atoned for them at the 
bar of public opinion. There is not a neutral independent 
newspaper in the world which has not condemned them — and 
nothing better represents their standing before mankind 
than that. 

Such are the contentions of the Allies and their sympathiz- 
ers. Against them the Germanic advocates have urged three 
main lines of defense. The first and strongest is the tu 
quoque argument — that, if the Germans are bad, their ene- 
mies are worse. The second is the old contention that all is 
fair in war. The third is the peculiar, esoteric doctrine of 
Innerlichkeit — the spiritual superiority of the German race, 
— which, while it demands that its opponents adhere rigidly 
to the rules of civilized warfare, absolves from that obligation 
those of Teutonic blood, who are declared to owe obedience 



492 THE YALE REVIEW 

only to a higher law, created by themselves. To these con- 
tentions the Allies have retorted, in effect, that the record 
of broken faith and atrocities speaks for itself, since it is 
impossible for the Germans to set against their acts any 
such list on the part of their opponents. Against the sec- 
ond assertion, not only the Allies and their sympathizers, 
but men in general, have virtually declared in favor of the 
doctrine that the interests of humanity are superior to suc- 
cess, and that the practices which violate its most fundamen- 
tal principles must cease. Against the third, no argument 
avails. Upon the battlements of blind belief, reason beats in 
vain. Yet, apart from their natural predilection in favor of 
their own customs and convictions, all nations would 
undoubtedly unite in declaring that it is wholly impossible 
that truth is revealed only to one among their number ; that, 
amid all the vast and complex human societies, one alone 
should enjoy the light, and the rest be forever condemned 
to sit in outer darkness; and that superiority in all things 
is an attribute of any merely human race or organization. 
Nor are men in general inclined to admit the doctrine of a 
nation of supermen. 

Such is the heart of the great argument as it stands now 
after eighteen months; and the German activities upon 
which it is based are the reasons why the war enters its last 
phase in the form it does. For the questions these activities 
have raised are deeper far than international agreements or 
systems of government ; they are the problems of the human 
heart. And because they are, they must be fought out. 
The opponents of those who hold to such practices as we have 
seen introduced, have determined that, if strength in them 
lies, they will make an end, not merely of plans to dominate 
the Continent or gain new footholds beyond the sea, not of 
military autocracy alone nor its exponents. They are bent 
upon the elimination from men's thought and action of 
those devices which, resurrected from the worst days of the 
past, have found newer and fiercer expression in the hands 



WAR AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 493 

of men who have summoned the beneficent forces of science 
to replace the humane conventions of society with their 
unbridled will. They have set themselves to crush out that 
return to barbarism which has clothed itself in a pseudo- 
modern philosophy and very real modern mechanical forms. 

This is why the combatants found, on their second 
Christmas in the trenches, none of the friendlier feeling 
which the first expressed. This is the reason why the senti- 
ments of all not directly under German influence have 
turned against their cause. Those now directing German 
destinies have set their standards against that common 
humanity developed through a thousand years of civilized 
progress. And no disinterested man but must condemn the 
leadership which has brought this to pass, obscuring great 
qualities with the blindness of a few engendered by devotion 
to the god of power. Far beyond any question of politics, 
men now fight for the continuation of society itself, and of 
the hard-won moral heritage upon which it is based. 

Yet these, though by far the greatest, are not the only 
results of the past eighteen months upon the thought of 
mankind. If there is one feature of the present day more 
remarkable than another, it is the emergence of many things 
long alien or neglected in our daily life. The revival of a 
profound religious sense, the development of poetry, the 
searchings of the heart accompanying a deep spiritual experi- 
ence, are evident on every hand abroad. At the same time, 
the tremendous economic problems raised by the continuance 
of the conflict portend not merely a political and financial 
but a social revolution once the period of strife is done. 
These no less than the military and political results of the 
struggle — perhaps far more — are the problems which press 
already for solution, and will press ever increasingly in the 
future. The generation which fought the war will dis- 
appear; the millions already in their graves will in no long 
time be joined by their comrades. But long before the last 
roll of the vanished armies is made up, and for long after- 



494 THE YALE REVIEW 

ward, the issues of the conflict which are neither warlike 
nor diplomatic will continue to demand a statesmanship 
greater even than those imposed upon us by the war itself. 
For there can be no doubt that the conclusion of the armed 
conflict will be the beginning of a social situation upon whose 
treatment depends the future of civilized mankind. 

But what, meanwhile, of the United States ? What has it 
learned and what is it to do as a result of what we have seen 
and endured, and hoped, and feared, while our kinsmen 
beyond the sea were engaged in this work of destruction? 
We have been in, if not of, the war; when it is over we, 
like the combatants, and in perhaps no less degree, must face 
the problems it has raised. We have grown richer, and it 
seems to many, in consequence, more powerful; we have 
contributed to every phase of the conflict but one; we have 
been appealed to by every side not merely for material but 
for moral support. And what is the result? The answer 
is peculiarly difficult and unsatisfactory. We have grown 
in wealth without a corresponding increase in responsibility, 
and our prosperity has been accompanied by no discipline 
which makes for the strengthening of national character. 
We have lacked the tremendous experience which comes 
from the expenditure of the last ounce of physical energy, 
and a faith strained to the breaking point; and, with all the 
material losses which accompany any such struggle such as 
Europe now endures, it remains an open question whether 
in comparison, let us say with France, we have gained or 
lost in the ultimate resolution of events. For of all the 
nations of equal rank in the world, we have not been able to 
formulate with any definiteness a collective opinion into a 
national ideal or policy, and take measures to put it into 
effect. 

This is not, perhaps, to be much wondered at when we 
consider that the United States has been the scene, if not of 
the conflict of arms, of the greatest conflict of opinions in 
the world. As in other regions remote from the field of 



WAR AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 495 

battle, but in far greater degree, there has been felt here the 
influence of the leaven at work among the warring powers. 
Apart from the horrors of armed struggle, the present war 
has deluged mankind with an amount of loose political utter- 
ance — it would be sacrilege to call it thought — which is only 
less appalling than the carnage itself; and of this America 
has had its full share. To bolster up the worst of its con- 
troversial atrocities, history has been distorted till it cries 
aloud for vengeance; logic has been twisted out of what- 
ever resemblance it ever bore to reason; law has been trans- 
formed into cabalistic formulae beside which its earlier com- 
plexities appear simple axioms; and political science, 
so-called, has reverted to original chaos, without form, and 
for the most part void. The sophists have done their part, 
and in their hands new and preposterous fantasies have 
assumed almost the appearance of reality. The propagan- 
dists have aided them by advancing the most patently absurd 
contentions, with such apparent wisdom, gravity, and pro- 
found conceit, and maintaining them with such solemn 
assurance that even the wary have not infrequently been 
deceived. 

It is small wonder, then, in this topsy-turvy world which 
the debaters have created for us, that men are misled; for 
many of our oldest and most deeply rooted convictions have 
withered in a night, and the result has been a shock to our 
national complacency. We may smile over the grotesque 
misreading of history from which Count zu Reventlow and 
his followers have drawn their fantastic theory of the growth 
of the British Empire ; but we find nothing amusing in the 
collapse of our firmly held belief that the United States 
was "the melting pot of nations," and the realization that it 
has not assimilated its foreign elements, nor fused them into 
one, least of all the one which we once fondly believed was 
ours. We may reject the arguments which are set forth 
to justify Belgium and the "Lusitania," the Zeppelin and 
the submarine; but we cannot evade the fact that our 



496 THE YALE REVIEW 

boasted civilization has made such things mechanically possi- 
ble without making them morally impossible. We may 
resent the insult to our intelligence involved in diplomatic 
interchanges which seek to convince us that outrages against 
American lives are justified or purchasable; but we cannot 
much longer deceive ourselves into believing that wealth is 
power, and distance a shield. We may felicitate ourselves 
upon the activities of our private citizens which have rescued 
one people from starvation and another from the plague, 
and given aid to sufferers everywhere; but we cannot 
escape the suspicion that our public course has too often 
gained for us the less than kindly contempt of every warring 
power. We may repudiate charges of selfish materialism; 
but we have discovered that too many among us interpret 
neutrality as a denial of our privilege to choose between 
right and wrong, and to declare our choice. And this, to 
men who have been unaccustomed for three hundred years to 
take their opinions ready-made from an "inspired" author- 
ity, is a rude shock to our conception of liberty. 

But these are not all, nor even the most important of the 
many considerations which have forced themselves upon us 
as a result of the events of the past eighteen months. Over- 
shadowing all others are two upon which our intellectual 
energies must be bent if we are to gain anything of value 
from the great world experience. The first is the immedi- 
ate question of national security, so-called preparedness; 
the second is the fundamental problem of government itself, 
the age-long issue of democracy. 

Thus far, it must be confessed, the clamor of the dis- 
putants has not tended greatly to clear the issue; for the 
divergences between the various groups engaged are so 
wide as to prevent any real conclusion on what ought ulti- 
mately to be our policy. It is as futile to argue that our 
coast is invulnerable as to declare that we have virtually no 
coast defense; yet each opinion finds willing advocates. It 
is as idle to contend that we are in no danger from aggres- 



WAR AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 497 

sion as to affirm that the enemy is all but at our gates ; yet 
each conviction has its champions. The Monroe Doctrine, 
we have been assured, is now an outworn shibboleth, repug- 
nant to all South American sentiment. But if, like Holland 
three centuries ago, a European power should seize Bahia 
and Pernambuco as bases for a new colonial adventure, we 
should find overnight that no nation, least of all the United 
States, can be indifferent to the fate or ambitions of the 
world outside. We have been taught that nations get what 
they prepare for; and some assert that, this being true, 
pacifism should be our aim, and a disarmed neutrality our 
policy. But if the past years have taught us nothing else, 
they should have made it clear to everyone that a spirit of 
great adventure and unscrupulous statecraft has again taken 
its place in the affairs of the world, and there is forced upon 
us, not the choice between war and peace, but between 
security and subjugation. 

Amid such confusion of tongues, it is not to be wondered 
at that the debates of our lawgivers have tended to temper 
technical advice with political exigency; nor that, in the 
peculiar organizations of our system of government, the 
obvious lessons of the present war, as evidenced by the 
experiences of England and of France, have scarcely pene- 
trated the minds of men at odds over questions of political 
theory and partisan expediency. The ability of our manu- 
facturers to produce war material, the popular response 
to the appeal for more military training, the utterances of 
many public men outside the field of politics — have again 
demonstrated the fact that, save at certain periods and in 
certain hands, a popular government represents not the high- 
est efficiency, intelligence, and conscience of the community 
but an average reduced to meet the qualities of the lower 
levels it must placate or persuade. 

Yet this is not the root of the matter, after all, save as 
it bears upon the whole problem of democracy. We have 
seen in this great war that, contrary to a widely held belief, 

32 



498 THE YALE REVIEW 

it has not been those who had the least to lose but those 
who had the most that have been foremost in the fight. We 
have seen an aristocracy justify itself. We have seen that 
the great, imperative necessity is to rouse the smug and com- 
placent masses, to bring the slackers into line, and enforce 
duty and self-sacrifice, authority and obedience upon those 
to whom such matters were unheeded or unknown. That 
result has been achieved in Germany chiefly by the pressure 
of government; in England by persuasion; in France by 
both. But in each country it teaches the same lesson, that 
universal service is the real democracy and a volunteer sys- 
tem a discrimination in favor of the least desirable element 
of society. It has thrown into high relief the problem which 
every community is called upon to face, the radical selfish- 
ness of a great number of its members. When the spirit of 
self-sacrifice, of patriotism, pride, or shame, has sent the 
finer elements of a people to the post of danger, there always 
remains a residuum which seeks safety or profit or both 
from the bitter extremity of its native land. Nor has any 
nation, least of all our own, any call to sneer at our kins- 
folk across the sea; for in the darkest hours of our history, 
the Revolution and the Civil War, we exhibited the same 
phenomena. That, in a like crisis, we should again exhibit 
such a condition no one can doubt. 

And here lies the first of our lessons of the war. That 
we shall have men and munitions for our defense goes with- 
out saying; that we shall even have some plan of defense is 
equally true. But that we shall have the spirit and the 
intelligence to make the best use of our resources, the 
courage to impose the great burden equally upon all, is 
another matter. For the greatest assets of a nation in a 
crisis are not men and munitions; they are leaders, and 
followers with a purpose beyond the desire to save their 
skins. If we are to be driven to take up the burdens of a 
world power, it is not enough to have resources such as ours. 
It is not enough even to have a navy and military pro- 



WAR AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 499 

gramme, coast defenses, an army, ships, and aeroplanes. 
Such a programme means the establishment of a new pro- 
fession, diplomacy ; of new careers in the public service, civil 
and military, which shall attract men of talent away from 
the mere pursuit of wealth. It means not merely the edu- 
cation of men to fill such posts, but of the people at large 
to meet these new responsibilities and the burdens which 
they entail — above all, to view life and public affairs with 
new eyes, and to exchange their old provincial attitude of 
mind for an intelligent conception of the world in which 
they live. It means, in brief, regeneration and a policy. 

It is a hard alternative; and there is little wonder that 
the pacifists have found in it the chief basis for their argu- 
ments for peace, since this plan is not compatible with the 
comfortable isolation which we have so long enjoyed. Nor — 
and this is the crux of the whole great problem to our 
minds — does it at first sight seem compatible with those 
great principles upon which our whole fabric of govern- 
ment and society is based. And this is the question which 
has turned men not merely towards pacifism but to review 
the entire basis of our political and moral existence as a 
people. For there are those, neither unlearned nor unwise, 
who, at the beginning of the conflict, saw good reasons for 
doubting whether self-government was, after all, justified 
of its children. Nor is this wholly surprising. The spec- 
tacle of a powerful, efficient, and inscrutable if not silent, 
autocracy, apparently omniscient and irresistible, compared 
with the earlier phenomena exhibited by democracies con- 
fronted by a crisis, made many long for less liberty and 
more government. The panegyrics upon German unity, 
self-sacrifice, patriotism, and preparedness, found credence 
even among many loth to give up their faith in democracy. 
And had the great drive on Paris succeeded, had the war 
been brought to a speedy end with the triumph of the Teu- 
tonic cause, there is little doubt but the world might have 
turned, in greater or less degree, to Prussian principles of 



500 THE YALE REVIEW 

government, perhaps even to Prussian principles of public 
morality — as, after the Franco-Prussian war, it turned to 
the Prussian military system. Democracy would thus have 
received a damaging blow at the moment when it seemed 
about to make fresh conquests in the strongholds of autoc- 
racy. 

But the drive failed; and men have had time to think. 
That is the tremendous service which the French army and 
the English expeditionary force rendered to the world ; that 
is the meaning of the battle of the Marne. Since then it 
has been possible to judge from the revelations of the morals 
and methods of the militarists something of the meaning of 
the spirit which they represent. From those revelations we 
have learned much. We have seen a marvel of mechanical 
efficiency applied to war; we have come to realize, as never 
before, how great and far-reaching were the results of 
economic and of scientific methods, of thoroughness, of the 
capacity for taking infinite pains, of intelligent organiza- 
tion, of foresight and preparation for apparently every 
contingency. We have recognized the great qualities which 
made for success in many fields; and we have given 
unstinted, perhaps unwarranted praise to their authors. 

Yet this is not the only lesson we have learned, nor the 
greatest. As the long, wearing conflict has gone on, after the 
first great shock and strain of great peaceful societies sud- 
denly precipitated into a struggle for existence, it has been 
a tremendous relief to those of us who still believe in gov- 
ernment of the people and by the people, as well as for the 
people, to realize that the democracies have not been unequal 
to the burdens laid on them. Never is comparison between 
autocracy and democracy more damaging to the popular 
side of the argument than in time of war. The one with 
its huge complex mechanism subject to one will, secret in 
plan, firm in decision, and in action swift, shows its most 
favorable side at such a time. The other, slow to decide and 
slower still to strike, hampered by rival counsels, compelled 



WAR AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 501 

to seek support for all its actions from a million-opinioned 
populace, finds its every weakness glaringly revealed in a 
situation where immediate action is imperative. For democ- 
racy is essentially a government of peace. Yet the democ- 
racies have met the test. They have revealed a resource and 
resolution, which, with all the defects engendered by the 
necessity of haste, have yielded nothing to the long prepara- 
tion of the absolutists. They have developed a determina- 
tion, which, proceeding not from the will of groups or 
individuals but from the slowly roused yet mighty and deep- 
lying purpose of a whole people, is far more terrible than 
that of an autocracy. They have not shown at once the 
leadership which comes from long preparation to a given 
end, but they have developed in the stress of war a school of 
public men tried in the fire of events which purges all the 
dross, till they remain the last and finest expression of the 
people whence they sprang. And they have, above all, 
remained throughout true to those principles of humanity 
which are the foundation of self-government. 

Nor is this all we have learned from this great conflict of 
arms and ideals. We have found that there may be great- 
ness of aim and incredible efficiency in execution without 
that higher morality, that deeper public sense, which for 
want of a better name we call conscience. We have seen 
success so deified that men were ready to sacrifice the things 
which many of us hold dearer than success for the accom- 
plishment of their aims. We have seen that the material 
needs of a society may be infinitely better cared for than 
our own, while individual liberty and, if you like, dignity, 
are ruthlessly sacrificed to the will of a state, which, in its 
last resolution, means a handful of its members. We have 
come to realize that there are two standards of efficiency. 

And we are not moved to follow such an example. We 
are prepared to accept the lessons of patriotism and pre- 
paredness, of system and efficiency, the skill and infinite 
pains which make for material greatness, the social care 



502 THE YALE REVIEW 

which makes for the betterment of the masses, the many 
virtues of a great people in their private affairs. But we 
are not ready to accept the unqualified worship of success; 
we are not ready to exchange self-government for autocracy, 
liberty for comfort; to sacrifice honor and the esteem of 
our fellow men for power, nor the higher for the lower effi- 
ciency. We shall prepare, but not for conquest; we shall 
educate, but not for world dominion; we shall hold to our 
ideals and raise them as high as we may; but we shall not 
demand the world's assent to them at the price of conflict. 
And we shall maintain, as we began, our insistence upon our 
rights to be the captains of our souls, and our insistence 
upon a "decent respect for the opinions of mankind." We 
shall endeavor, so far as in us lies, to adapt our old battle- 
cry to new conditions, "to establish Justice, insure domestic 
Tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the 
general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty" 
And this is the answer of America. 



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